INTRODUCTION.

THE object of the present volume is to shew more completely the precise points of difference between the Chronicles of Wendover and Paris, by furnishing the reader with the additions and various readings made by the latter historian to the work of the former, and so rendering the history more perfect, by combining the labours of both writers, so far as they are the narrators of contemporaneous events. In doing this, it was the original intention of the editor to include also a collation of the Historia Minor; but the perusal of the first few pages of that work, appended to this Introduction, will be sufficient, it is hoped, to shew that such an attempt, however desirable, was altogether impracticable. The different style of language used in relating the same events as are recorded in the Greater Chronicle, the additional matter also with which it is supplied, would have made it necessary to print volumes in order to render such a collation at all perfect. It does, indeed, seem extraordinary that such a collation should never have been made; still more so, perhaps, that the work itself never should have been printed, being, as it is, so entirely throughout the original work of Matthew Paris, and existing, as at the present day, in the original handwriting of its ingenious and learned compiler.1 In former times, however, men appear to have rested equally well satisfied with the Historia Major;

1 In the British Museum, MS. Reg. 14 C. vII.

b

since, with the exception of the Cecil MS. erroneously stated by Wats as being deposited in the C.C.C. Library, Cambridge, no other copy of the Historia Minor is known to have existed. That the Cecil MS. did contain the lesser chronicle is clear from the various readings given by Wats at the end of the printed editions of Paris, all differing much from the present received text, and agreeing verbatim with the Royal MS. Interesting, however, as this manuscript is on its own account, it becomes even more valuable from the light which, as the autograph of Paris, it throws upon the question of the authenticity of Wendover's history. From a comparison of it with the Cambridge manuscript, the innovations, whether by correction or addition, of Matthew Paris may be ascertained with the most minute accuracy; for in the first volume of the latter MS., extending to the year 1189,' the additions sometimes on the margin, at others by insertion of new leaves, at others again by erasures written over, are all by precisely the same hand. The volume spoken of appears, in fact, to be the very copy of Wendover's Chronicle, or the Great Chronicles of St. Alban's, used by Paris as the foundation of his Historia Major,— the 'copy' as it were from which his amended text was to be transcribed. The second volume is by altogether a different and a somewhat later hand. The text is no longer Wendover's, but, as it would seem, the transcript of Paris' 'first edition' of that chronicler, and it is remarkable that it is apparently in the same handwriting with that of the Cotton MS. in the British Museum. Still, the text of Wendover is not altogether. left, and additions and erasures continue in the hand

1 At the end of the year 1188, in | usque ad annum Domini hic notatum;' the MS. of the Historia Minor, occurs the following note on the margin, 'Hec est vera contractio historie Mathei Parisiensis in primo volumine, in quo habetur historia ab origine mundi

where allusion is evidently made to the Cambridge MS., as is probably intended also in the marginal note at the same point of time in the MS. of Wendover.

writing of Paris himself. That it was the first transcript would appear evident from the fact, that those which appear as marginal variations in this are in the Cotton manuscript embodied in the text; at the same time that a few passages occurring in it, which are not found in the other, might justify us in the belief that they were both executed in the lifetime of Paris himself.

From the foregoing statement therefore it would appear, that we have from a comparison of these manuscripts the complete history of the labours of Matthew Paris. We have, in the first place, the text of his predecessor left almost in its original state, so much so indeed as not even to need a fresh transcript of the Chronicle, since the margin and a few interpolated leaves are sufficient for the purpose. In the next place, we have from the year 1189 a fresh transcript, or rather new volume, called for by the additional matter to be inserted and corrections to be made; again, this having been corrected with due care, still by the author himself, we have the more perfect form, as far as an uninterrupted text can make it so, in the complete transcript as afforded us by the Cotton manuscript; and beyond all this we have Paris' very autograph abridgment1 of, or compilation from, the whole, as exhibited in the Historia Minor, now preserved in the old Royal Collection of MSS. in the British Museum.

Supposing, however, the point to be established that Paris did not write all, but only so much of the Chronicle that bears his name, it may yet be asked,

'That this abridgment was com- | phrase from memory); and the paspiled also from the Cambridge MS. sages so stigmatized refer generally I cannot but think clear, for the following reason. In that MS., on the margin, is frequently written by Paris himself the word 'Offendiculum,' or

to foreign affairs, as councils, or relate legends of saints, neither of which are ever introduced, as I found by accurate collation, into the Historia Minor.

how is it proved that Wendover wrote the remainder? For an answer to this question the reader is referred to the Preface of this edition, where, in addition to the arguments adduced in his behalf, may be added further the mode of dividing the work, as it is recognized in the compiler's prologue, as also the tacit acknowledgment of Paris himself, in suffering to be inserted on the margin of his new volume,' at the time when Wendover terminated his labours, the note following, 'Huc usque scripsit cronica dominus Rogerus de Wendovre,' etc.

In preparing the present volume, the Editor has been careful to preserve every important variation with which an accurate collation of the text with Wats' edition of Matthew Paris and the Variantes Lectiones of that editor could furnish him. He has also, in any doubtful case, sought assistance from the MSS. to which allusion has been before made. At the same time that he has not thought it necessary to preserve every trifling deviation from the original, which, although highly important in many cases in editing the classical writers of Rome and Greece, can yet be but of little real value in an historian writing at a period when elegance of style was, comparatively speaking, little cultivated. The variations to which allusion is here made are such as the reading æternaliter for in perpetuum, sicut for prout, in fugam cæteros for reliquos in fugam, etc., alternating very much on the side of either historian. The additions, however, are everywhere introduced, and any marked difference of style preserved. The following introductory chapters of the Historia Minor are here appended, in order to convey to the reader some idea of the mode adopted by Paris in the composition of that highly interesting Chronicle.

This volume he afterwards pre- of text, 'Hunc librum dedit frater sented, probably, to St. Alban's Ab- Matheus de Parisiis Deo [et S. Albey, as might appear from the follow-bani ecclesiæ,' now erased]. ing rubric on the top of the first column